Air Conditioning – Airports and others

We maintain the air conditioning systems and units at the airports on a planned visit frequency for World Duty Free and a few other retailers at the airports.  We carry out minor and Major visits.  A major visit may include an FGas check which is done annually.

These visits can be monthly, 8 times a year, or every other month.

Our engineers are either directly employed or sub-contractors who visit the airports at the desired frequency.  Most of these visits are done at night, as per the customer’s request to avoid being on the shop floor when busy.

What does the engineer do when on site?

The engineer will put up ladder’s or maybe use a small platform to access the air conditioning units in the ceiling.  They will drop down and take out the filters and clean these using a henry hoover.  They will replace the filter and then check the pump, the actuator, the float to ensure all is working correctly.  They will take temperature readings of air and water (where chilled water is the source of cooling) and record these on their PPM (planned preventative maintenance) job sheet.  The engineer’s role is to ensure the Air conditioning unit is in tip top condition so it can cope with the many thousands of passengers that pass under them at the UK airports.

Reactive calls

This is where an air conditioning unit/system has failed.  There could be many reasons for this and an engineer attendance is requested by the customer to rectify.  The customer tells us their desired response time or SLA (service level agreement).

This could be:

• 2 hours
• 24 Hours
• 10 days

We log a task on our system and also update the task on the World Duty Free system called Concept.  We arrange for the engineer to attend site to investigate the issue.  If he can rectify the issue there and then he will, if not, further works/parts might be required which usually means a quotation needs to be prepared for the customer to agree to the cost before we can go any further.

Quoted Works

Chilled Solutions raise a quotation to the customer which gives details of the works needed, costs and then a total cost and often labour time required and cost for any airport permits that might be required ahead of work starting.

Once the customer agrees to the quote, they raise a PO (purchase order) for us which is then our commitment from them to get paid at the end of the job.  We then plan in the work, order materials/parts and laisse with the customer to agree a mutually convenient start date.  Again, these works are often done at night as airports don’t allow for work in the daytime unless it’s an extreme emergency.